blissful nightmares & mechanical dreams

Main Menu

Deuil ‎– Shock / Deny

Radical expressions in art have always hinted at a sort of social ménage. And underground music, when deprived of an articulated backboned philosophy, has taken the role of the observer and guardian of the urine garden of delights. Extreme metal listeners are in a quest for a scatological Graal. Inside the scene there is a “fecal eloquence” that has become idolatrous in terms of artistic tastes.

Deuil exalts in a slimy perspective on living as the result of nonsensical choices and offerings. The Belgian band almost feature an economic value on their approach, both technically and thematically, treating musical expression as a product, of the most disgusting outcome. You have to accept and ingurgitate bluntly the slobber pouring from their microphones, and let yourself in. Or simply take it as a fact that you have been always there. This two-track record has the vocation of abjection, and maybe for some of us passive sodomy would be less repugnant.

The record begins with “Shock”, a squalid black-sludge composition, seeming to scamper the accords around as if trying to discover the carrion near you. Isn’t this the ambiance of a sleigh sauna where all of us tenants of ignominy attempt to brush off our ostrich vanity? The fulminant, lyrically demanding black metal is coextensive with ravaging progressive lines, a more substantial interpretation of the cascadian style. Differing from the pastoral painters from America, for example, Deuil takes its inspiration from agonized existence; their view is so bleak as if even the simplest physical contact could turn into a shock. The other song, “Deny”, stretches its tentacles in slow raw-doom gesticulations; an image of rejection and horror more than an attempt to seize reality and choke it. And then the song explodes in an ecstasy of regret and denial, expressed through the means of a maniacal metal dazzling assault, arrested at some points by some confused andante movement.

Half an hour of perturbing and frustrating music, uneasy to assimilate all the way through, unless you share a certain psychic configuration. With the so called wave of depressive black metal falling with legitimacy into desuetude, perhaps this new approach, represented by Deuil at high standards, should satisfy even the pubescent listener, not to mention razorblade stores.